Enter the Void

2009 trip

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A drug dealer is shot and enters the titular void, an act which apparently involves a lot of floating and watching his sister have sex. Flashbacks reveal childhood tragedy and flashforwards reveal other things. Apparently, it's a Tibetan Book of the Dead thang.

Gaspar Noe makes incredibly happy films. In this one, he shows the viewer things they probably never thought they'd see and likely wouldn't want to. Queasy cinematography and hallucinatory hijinks, a true assault on the senses, make this unlike anything you've ever seen before unless you happened to see the only other Noe move on my blog, Irreversible. Noe attacks your eyes and ears and intentionally, I suspect, working to make the viewer a little nauseous, all while showing you things that you appreciate because you haven't seen anything like it on the screen before. I watched a great deal of this bloated guided tour through the world's most dismal kaleidoscope with mouth agape. And yes, I'm aware that there's a misplaced modifier in that sentence, but this movie took away my ability to fix things like that. Even the opening credits floored me, electric and shocking, especially when compared to the syrupy, more reflective pace of the movie. The mostly first-person perspective is unique, and Noe takes the viewer over the city, through light bulbs, deep into the past, despairingly into the future, into human beings, and pretty much anywhere else he feels like taking us. And looking at this from a purely technical standpoint, I don't see how he does it exactly and would label this a masterpiece, though not always an easy-to-watch masterpiece. The problem is that the movie is way too long, and the acting, especially from the kid who plays the lead, is bad in distracting ways. Both of those issues really take away some of the power this movie could have had. It's still an experience though, one that I'm not likely to ever forget, and I would recommend it to my more adventurous readers. Warning, however: It's not really very happy.

Oprah Movie Club for March: Paprika

2006 anime

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 12/20)

Plot: Some fiend's stolen a dream machine, and it's up to a scientist and her titular alter-ego to save humanity. Or something like that. Honestly, I wasn't nearly smart enough to figure out what the hell was going on here.

But I liked what I was looking at! This stretches the elastic boundaries of what animation can do, dips deep inside the old noggin, scrambles things around, and leaves you baffled but aesthetically pleased. I thought the story was frustratingly incoherent, but that might not be the movie's fault. Then again, my brother's reasonably intelligent and was also confused, so maybe it was the movie's fault. He's not seen Inception, a film that seems to have borrowed a lot of this one's ideas--Jello floors, elevator rides through the subconscious, frog musicians. I have seen Inception which might have given me an advantage although I did have an extra obstacle in trying to avoid thinking about Leonardo Dicaprio. The guy's just dreamy. On second thought, I'm not sure there were frogs in Inception. I think part of the problem for me (and again, keep in mind that I'm a dumb guy) is that I had trouble understanding the motivations of most of the characters. There's a character we never really get to meet who befuddled me, and the villain's logic never really made much sense to me. But again, I did appreciate the manic creativity and goofy surrealism, and cartoon nudity always is good for a bonus point or two. I don't see how there could have possibly been enough room on a storyboard for all the ideas that show up on screen here. You get walking refrigerators, giant headed guys, butterfly girls, talking dolls, musical animals. The screen's just filled with this stuff, and even though a lot of the imagery was redundant, I looked forward to seeing that parade. As much as I enjoyed the cartoon visually, however, I hated it aurally. The soundtrack, other than the cute and unhinged parade music, was irritating. A lot of times, I watch a movie like this (Synecdoche, New York; anything from Czechoslovakia; You've Got Mail) and think that if I just watched it a second time, I'd understand it all a lot better. I think I could watch Paprika a dozen times and still not figure out what was going on.

OK, what other Oprah Movie Clubbers got a chance to see this one? What did you think?

Head

1968 psychedicasploitation

Rating: 16/20

Plot: None really.

So it's a product of its time, the technicolor acid-drenched psychedelic late-60s. And it stars the Monkees who don't quite have the charisma or charm of the Fab Four and, as really more of a joke TV band, didn't have the musical chops or pedigree to be involved in anything musically or visually trippy. And sure, some of the visual effects date it and the poster is awfully yellow. But for whatever reason, this freeform trek through the subconscious works. And the stream-of-conscious script by director Bob Rafelson and none other than Jack Nicholson is frequently clever satirically and makes it work as a metafilm. As a story, it's spilled soup, a hodgepodge of spilled soups actually that would likely scald a lot of people, but it does have this way of weaving in and out of itself in fun and surprising ways. The songs aren't too bad either. They're lower shelf psychedelic numbers maybe, but they still work here. Add Annette Funicello and a cameo appearance by Frank Zappa and you've got yourself a movie! And no they're not the Beatles, but this is loads better than the weirdo equivalent Magical Mystery Tour movie. And if you look hard enough through the surrealist sludge, you'll very likely find a little meaning, too. Sneakily intelligent and delightfully quirky, Head is a nice little relic that is worth seeing for fans of the goofball genre.

Christmas on Mars

2008 psychedelic Christmas movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A space station floats above Mars on Christmas Eve. Things aren't going well on the space station--supplies are running low, morale is low, there's a bit of cabin fever, and the guy hired to dress up as Santa Claus has gone crazy and committed suicide. They take on a guest, a mute alien, and try to avoid catastrophe.

To say this isn't for everybody is an understatement. It'll attract a certain crowd though--people with a good supply of hallucinogens and holiday cheer. I was impressed with the shoestring budget set design. This was made over an eight year period in the backyard of Flaming Lips' frontman Wayne Coyne. It's definitely a case where the creative minds involve manage to overcome the problem of limited finances to put together some visuals that are really cool. A lot of the sets were put together seemingly with dollar store purchases and household appliances. The pacing is very deliberate, the story is freaky, and the effects are trippy-dippy. Shades of Solaris are within, but this reminded me a whole lot of The American Astronaut and Dark Star. With some Eraserhead mixed in. And maybe a pinch of It's a Wonderful Life. Some of this was pretty funny and a lot of this was really pretty, but there was really nothing to latch on to. The acting is also about as bad as acting gets, and the characters don't have enough substance to make them matter. The dialogue is really poorly written, clunky and unnatural. There are definitely way too many words in this; it would have been a lot better if it had as many as 2001. This is a movie that is fun because it doesn't take itself seriously at all while at the same time being a movie that would have benefited from taking itself a little more seriously.

Bonus points awarded for a scene with a marching band that had female genitalia for heads.

The Phantom Tollbooth

1970 Chuck Jones cartoon

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Bored youngster Milo is tired of spending all his time moaning and groaning about having nothing to do. So he does what any youngster would do in the late-1960s--he experiments with hallucinogenic drugs. The hallucinations began almost immediately. A tollbooth, actually a phantom one, materializes, and

It's a dull bad trip in a dull movie. I had high enough expectations--I like Tom and Jerry and I remember the novel fondly as kind of a poor man's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a boy Alice. But the late-60s/early-70s seem like the dark ages for animation. This is dated and boring, and although there's some imaginative characters and settings, it's just all so sluggish and silly. Blandly creative or maybe creatively bland. The voice work doesn't work, bad plays-on-words really stand out, and I hate the kid, both the flesh and blood and animated versions. And those songs! There must have been a rule during the dark ages of animation that all animated features were required to have really bad songs. I don't know who did the songs for this, but I'm sure he left it off his resume. I'd much rather watch a couple hours of Tom and Jerry cartoons than this. Unless they're the ones with the little gray diapered mouse (Jerry's cousin?). I hated that character. This, by the way, was a cartoon that Abbey couldn't even finish watching. She also likes Tom and Jerry.

Science if Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painleve

Short nature documentaries from 1928-1982

Rating: n/r

I dealt with some ridicule for watching these over several days, but I'm not sure why because it's the sort of thing that's usually parked in my alley. Painleve came from an avant-garde background (apparently the surrealists and other avant-garde filmmakers would borrow his footage for their own projects), and these movies were shown in avant-garde theaters and cine clubs in Paris. Painleve uses close-ups, magnification, microscopic views, slow speed, fast speed, and a variety of other tricks to show things that you either don't know exist or wouldn't ever expect to witness. And it's all with a background of weird experimental electronic music, people banging on pots and pans (literally), or jazzy scores. Most of the footage is of underwater creatures--alien beings--and the black and white shots reminded me a lot of the Harry Smith Heaven and Earth Magic I watched last year. Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd could have performed in front of the short about liquid crystals, a kaleidoscopic series of images that also reminded me of some of Stan Brakhage's work. Undulating sea urchins, anguished male seahorses birthing twitching seahorse babies with bulging eyes, close-ups of yolk sacs, more yolk sacs than you can shake a stick at even, an orgy of slithering octopii with a breathless old pervert narrating, jerking agitated shrimp running from Groucho Marx, the perversely beautiful acera ballet and another hermaphroditic orgy, vampire bats lurching grotesquely around to hot jazz and sucking at a guinea pig, serial mollusk killers, tumbling brittle stars and feather stars with stalks and suckers waving constantly, single-cell worms heavily magnified, burrowing sea urchins, an octopus molesting a human skull. It's mesmerizing and educational, but you really won't want to take your focus off the visuals and read the subtitles much. Painleve gets clever at times, juxtaposing footage of seahorses with scenes of race horses and doing the same with the vampire bats and clips from Nosferatu or frequently ending the shorts with animated creatures spelling FIN, and I really liked that more playful quality. Not all of this stuff was golden. The "math" movies weren't worth watching (except for the one on the 4th dimension which taught me that 4th dimensional beings can see all our organs at once and extract our bones without breaking the skin), and the 1920's silent shorts were repetitive and dull compared to the later films about the same animals. The "research films," one about eggs and one called "Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog," were also really dull, and a stop-animated cartoon called "Bluebeard" was ugly and didn't really fit in. My advice, if you like this sort of thing, would be to watch the 8 or so films scored by Yo La Tengo, ignore the narrator, and enjoy the otherworldly visuals.

Yellow Submarine

1968 animated musical

Rating: 14/20 (Abbey: 20/20; Dylan: 2/20)

Plot: Pepperland is overrun by Blue Meanies, and it's up to Captain Fred to find help. He travels via title vehicle and gets the Beatles to help out. After many psychedelic adventures, they find their way back to Pepperland to fight off the Blue Meanies and their minions in the only way they know how--rock 'n' roll!

Dylan: "This is the worst movie ever made."

This is nowhere close to perfect, but it's always entertaining. This is stuffed with ideas, and sometimes the animation can't catch up with the sheer amount of them. There's so much going on on-screen at the same time that your eyes also have trouble keeping up. I guess this lends a bit of rewatchability to it, but it's also headache inducing. There are moments of sublimity, however. I love the "Eleanor Rigby" sequence. I really like the "Sea of Monsters" sequence, too. The biggest problem is that it needs to be 20 minutes shorter. There's a big fight at the end, the Beatles sing "All You Need Is Love" and get rid of the giant blue glove, and the movie's at a logical stopping place. But then it goes on for another 20 minutes with a couple of lesser songs. Most of the songs actually seem forced into the story of the movie, but individually, they mostly work pretty well as music videos. The main Blue Meanie, by the way, has to be the most flamboyantly gay character in movie history.

I had to trick Abbey into watching this instead of Beauty and the Beast or Spy Kids by getting out my Yellow Submarine action figures.

The Holy Mountain

1973 surrealist sci-fi religious horror romantic comedy fantasy adventure murder mystery

Rating: 18/20 (Jen: 2/20)

Plot: A thief wanders through a religious wasteland with a midget amputee. They enjoy a frog/chameleon circus and run into some Roman soldiers selling Jesuses. They force him to drink something, and while he's unconscious, they make hundreds of paper mache models of his crucified form. Oh, snap! He wakes up, destroys most of those, and then carries one with him to a high tower. After entering the tower via a giant golden hook, he meets an alchemist (Jodorowsky himself) who tells him everything he could possibly want to know about the holy mountain, a place where the immortals live. He also introduces him to the world's most powerful individuals, each a representation of one of the planets, and trains them to overthrow the gods and possibly achieve everlasting life.

Jodorowsky once said, "Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles." I believe him! Any movie with the line "Rub your clitoris against the mountain" has to be in any discussion about the greatest films ever made. The Holy Mountain, which I might like even more than El Topo, is a two hour hallucination, a bombardment of the grotesque, a scrambling of the senses. Jodorowsky--actor, writer, director, artist, composer--uses unsettling imagery to satirize mostly religious ideas but also other aspects of society (war, money, art). This thing is just an audacious explosion of creative ideas, almost too much for one audience to handle; I don't think I've ever seen a movie with so many flashes of visual brilliance. I wonder about the budget for this. Lots of extras, lots of props, lots of impressively and artistically designed sets. It's surely not for everybody (see Jen's rating), but it is more than likely unlike anything else you've seen before or will ever see again. After all, it's got this in it:

Just one of the many scenes that made me say, "This is the best scene in the history of cinema!" I didn't take my eyes off the screen, but I think Jen probably rolled her eyes every time I said it. Almost overwhelmingly brilliant stuff!

Me:

Wizards

1977 animation

Rating: 10/20 (Abbey: 18/20; Neither Dylan nor Emma could finish.)

Plot: I have no idea. There are troll things and fairies and wizards, and some kind of battle between good and evil sometime after a nuclear apocalypse. I believe everybody may be fighting over a magical robot donkey. War, apparently, is no good. And neither is technology.

Probably the less said about this, the better. I liked some of the imagination displayed and some of the animation, although the latter looked cheap. Lots of rotoscoping was used with the animated characters fighting over images of Nazis or smoke. It gave the cartoon a little psychedelic flavor. Unfortunately, none of the characters or plot made this the least bit interesting.

One of the people in this picture enjoyed this. None of the stuffed animals did.

Modesty Blaise

1966 spy satire

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Honestly, I'm not sure. The title character is a thief-turned-spy or a spy-turned-thief. She's assigned by somebody who might work for the government to oversee a transaction involving diamonds, a transaction that might involve Arabs. A suave wealthy Englishman wants the diamonds. Modesty recruits a sidekick, the British equivalent of Silver Spoon's Rick(y) Schroder. A bunch of old guys (also mostly suave) drift in and out of the movie, and it's quite possibly that Modesty Blaise slept with all of them. She's both clever and slutty!

I liked the style--lots of color flaunting and some really stupid camera choices like shooting scenes through wine glasses. Things are kept disorienting, and most of the movie looks fun. Terrence Stamp (General Zod in Superman, a voice in Halo 3, and also the main character in The Collector) is also in this, and he just might be the greatest actor of all time. Some of the Bond-esque weapons (most notably, an umbrella and a seagull the characters put together during a pivotal scene [although once again, I couldn't really figure out what was going on there. . . signalling the Arabs?) were cool. My biggest problem with this, other than the confusion about what the hell was going on, was that I couldn't figure out what it even was. Satire? Dry comedy? More straight spy stuff? It doesn't sustain a cohesive mood or voice, and that gives it a real scattered, clunky feel. Cheesy in the wrong places. Not goofy in the right ones. I'm not sure what I expected from this since I've never even heard of the comic books this was based on, but I still managed to wind up disappointed.

I wasn't born until 1973.

The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story

2003 documentary

Rating: 13/20

Plot: This is the story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd. Syd takes a lot of drugs, gets all crazy, and starts living someplace entirely different from where the rest of us live. The rest of Pink Floyd fall in love with lasers.

Ehhh. Some interesting archival footage, including video from Barrett's first LSD experience (?), some concert footage, and Robyn Hitchcock simultaneously making the audience uncomfortable (it's the blinking) and nailing "It Is Obvious." There's nothing enlightening here, and there's very little emotional pull. Instead, the story just plugs along monotonously, mostly through the memories of the other Pink Floyd members and a female narrator. I guess I didn't ever figure that Barrett played that backwards guitar on "Dominoes," and that makes that particular bit of that song just a little bit cooler. I've always been convinced that Barrett faked a lot of his mental illness to avoid the stresses involved with being a rock star, and this does nothing to change my mind.

Here I am, faking mental illness to avoid the stresses involved with being anything at all:

Performance

1970 half-Gangster/half-psychedelic movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Chas is a heartless thug of a gangster who ticks off his boss, Harry Flowers. Flowers sends other thugs to rough up Chas to punish him for his choices, and during the proceedings, one of those thugs is murdered. Chas is then forced to leave the gangster movie and enter a trippy rock 'n' roll video. He hides out in the basement of Turner, an aging rocker played by aging rocker Mick Jagger, and gradually the madness and counter-culture of Turner and his two female roommates assimilates Chas until boundaries are broken and identities merge.

Disorientingly lewd enough to, according to legend, cause a Warner Bros. exec's wife to vomit during a screening. Lots of color swirls, jump cuts, general choppiness, and experimental shots make this an interesting product of the late 1960's. The juxtaposition between the worlds of the gangster and the rocker is jarring but blurred mostly by eccentric offbeat style--jumpiness, weird angles, close-ups, crazy Moog music, psychedelic colors. That juxtaposition is a common theme with Nicholas Roeg, it seems. (See The Man Who Fell to Earth and Walkabout.) Like almost every other Roeg movie I've seen, it just seems incomplete; something missing is keeping it from being a really great film instead of just a really interesting one. (Note: co-directed by Donald Cammell) Visually arresting and thematically compelling, including a final twenty minutes that seems deliberately perplexing and left open to interpretation, this is something worth seeing again.

Lucyfer the Dog trying to stop me from watching Performance:

Girl on a Motorcycle

1968 drama


Rating: 9/20


Plot: A leather-clad woman sneaks loudly away on her motorcycle while her husband slumbers because she'd rather be with another lover, a guy whose hair doesn't sit nearly as high. Along the way, she drives recklessly and, when not writhing on her seat with a goofy expression on her face, thinks way too much.


aka Naked Under Leather, this erotic psychedelia has a few moments as exhilarating as I imagine either riding 120 mph on a motorcycle or wearing leather or a combination of the two would be. Most moments unfortunately are just dated--the use of superimposition and acid colors made it seem like I was looking at the backdrop of a Jefferson Airplane concert at times. There were also too many scenes in which characters drove through Sillyland, very obviously in front of a screen and not on an actual moving motorbike. The story should be simple enough, but it's clunked up with flashbacks and fantasy and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks and flashbacks within fantasies and fantasies within flashbacks. There might even be a fantasy inside of a flashback within another fantasy. The narrative is also dominated by an annoying voiceover that eventually made me wish Marianne Faithful would crash head on into something and fly through the air into the windshield of an oncoming car. Admittedly, I was a little cranky after a circus dream sequence near the beginning that ended much too soon. Actually, I would be very interested in watching a 91-minute prequel called Girl Standing on a Horse, but I'm not sure I want to see the current Marianne Faithful naked.



On second thought!

Here I am, bored with the movie and wondering if I should get my own motorcycle:

Barbarella--Queen of the Galaxy

1968 Science Fiction

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A whore is given the task of saving the universe. A robot makes innuendos, and Jane Fonda writhes and moans. Several wardrobe malfunctions and explosions later, Barbarella saves the galaxy while simultaneously giving me an erection.

Psychedelic and goofy fun with special effects that make Star Wars and 2001 look like movies that have much bigger budgets. They ain't got Jane Fonda, however! Jane Fonda's legs should have won an Academy Award, and if there was some kind of award for best sex scene ever, the stimulatingly spicy scene between the title character and Dildono (I've actually spelled his name wrong here, but this is how it should have been spelled) would win without question.

I really did enjoy this movie and not just because of the spiciness. It was visually interesting and since it never even thought of taking itself seriously, remained fun throughout. I also noted that both Duran Duran and Matmos got their names from this movie although I did see that the character and weird watery substance in the movie had names that were spelled differently.

Special note: This makes the second movie in a row that I've watched with Marcel Marceau in it. Complete coincidence.

Here I am becoming aroused: